Gibson, Lydia

GIBSON, LYDIA (1891-1964). A painter, poet, and illustrator, Lydia Gibson was also a noted activist. Daughter of ecclesiastical architect Robert W. Gibson and wife of CPUSA leader Robert Minor, Gibson got her political start as a teenager, serving on the executive board of Henrietta Rodman’s Feminist Alliance in New York City. In her early twenties, she went to Paris to study with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1912. Soon after her return in 1913, she married Harold “Pat” Mestre, a civil engineer, and together they moved to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where Mestre led the Workman’s Compensation Service Bureau and curated a government mine-related exhibit.

Gibson joined the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in June 1915, taking up leadership roles and beginning her involvement in radical circles. Through Vivian Pierce, she became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World and Alexander Berkman’s The Blast, for which she designed the masthead and contributed several covers and a poem. She was rumored to be indicted, along with Berkman, in the Preparedness Day Bombing of July 1916, but not prosecuted. While at The Blast, she met Bob Minor. Both were currently involved in other relationships but would reunite a few years later.
Returning from a trip to Tahiti with Mestre in 1921 to “try to find the spirit that Paul Gauguin found,” Gibson left her husband and moved to the anarchist colony in Croton-on-Hudson. She had published numerous poems in The Masses and The Liberator, also publishing art in the latter periodical, and after moving back to the East Coast, she joined the Liberator’s staff. There she reconnected with, and then married, a twice-divorced Minor.

As the story goes, Minor read Lenin to Gibson on their honeymoon, and Gibson became a devoted Communist. She supported the Party and Minor’s work while helping to edit The Liberator and contributing artwork to New Masses, Workers Monthly, The Daily Worker, Soviet Russia, New Pioneer, and the Yiddish-language Der hammer.

Gibson exhibited extensively in her lifetime. Serving as a member of the Society of Independent Artists, also the Salons of America, she likewise became a charter member of the Whitney Studio Club. She worked on the executive board of the New York section of the John Reed Club and on the membership committee of its Artists Group, and later a member of the American Artists’ Congress. In 1925, she illustrated Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Fairy Tales for Workers Children, and in 1934, she wrote and illustrated a curiously apolitical book, The Teacup Whale.

While Gibson published and showed her work frequently throughout the 1920s and 1930s, her production tapered in later years. Her political activity continued: In 1951, she posted $10,000 in bail for Pettis Perry and in 1962 another $10,000 in treasury bonds for the bail of Gus Hall and Benjamin J. Davis. She died in a hospital near Croton, her primary place of residence. Her paintings can be found in the collection of Columbia University (including a painting of Minor from 1918) and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Gross, Goldie. “Painting the Party: The Radical Art of Lydia Gibson (1891-1964).” Master’s
thesis, New York University, 2022.

North, Joseph. Robert Minor: Artist and Crusader, an Informal Biography. New York:
International Publishers, 1956.